CONSUMPTION PROJECT

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Imposed on our Planet our the demands of a population that has peaked beyond seven billion. We now find ourselves in the position of a population that is drowning in it’s excesses and therefore in it’s waste.
Here the Artist’s have created and photographed these installations that represent the unbridled materialistic greed of our society.

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If we could start again, wipe the slate clean, (hindsight is a great thing) we could have the opportunity to rebuild the fragile infrastructure of our planet. To evaluate how to live in an environmentally sustainable way without the uniquely destructive force of humans, known taxonomically as Homo sapiens (Ironically from the latin “Wise Man”) who have roamed the earth since the Middle Paleolithic two hundred thousand years ago.We could decide what is and isn’t needed to support life itself. How would we manage our natural resources? For example would we choose nuclear energy? Or could newer forms of technology provide us with the key to a greener source of power? Could we even learn to respect nature itself? But this is unfathomable, the realms of science fiction.

Imposed on our Planet our the demands of a population that has peaked beyond seven Billion (on the 31st of October 2011).Just how did we go from one billion to seven in just two hundred years? Better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West. U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline. But exact numbers are hard to come by — just small variations in fertility rates could mean a population of 15 billion by the end of the century.We now find ourselves in the position of a population that is drowning in it’s excesses and therefore in it’s waste.

Here the Artist’s have created and photographed these installations that represent the unbridled materialistic greed of our society.

With a goal: Regaining contact with everything that is essential.

It is with these images, the art installations constructed and recorded by Diver & Aguilar, that we must reflect - communicating the ignorance and the arrogance of the man who destroys the beauty of nature around him, by virtue of consumerism: The compulsive demand for objects that continues, paradoxically, to impoverish our lives.

Instead, what we need is to re-evaluate, strip away the superfluous, regenerate our mind first and then our lifestyles into a more equitable sharing of resources.Taking into account the future of a planet which now has seven billion inhabitants, a world that continues to choose non-renewable energy sources like oil, the fear of reaching peak oil continues to haunt the oil industry, should global production remain at the current rate there is only enough oil for the next 46 years.We always knew the world's oil reserves would run out eventually. The oil was formed by natural geological processes which occurred over millions of years. Oil consumption presently exceeds 25 billion barrels a year and demand continues to spiral upward, out of control. The outcome is inevitable.As we are witnessing now and in the years ahead, wars will be fought as the trail of blood for the conquest of the last remaining black gold and fuel reserves intensifies as the oil-dependent superpowers struggle in vein to preserve our unsustainable way of life.

Some economists and scientists have optimistically predicted that by 2050 the exhaustion of our supplies of oil, the scarcity of fossil fuels and natural gases could actually stabilize world politics.Surely, that would go against the grain? Of a species that everyday mines, extracts, shovels, burns, wastes, pumps and disposes of 1.8 million kilo’s of material in order to provide an average middle-class American family’s needs for one year.

In the USA alone each year over 12.7 billion kilo’s of food wastage is discarded and less than 2% of the total waste stream in the United States is recycled. While at the same time we witness oil and food exported for arms from Africa and its estimated there are currently well over 900 million under-nourished and 1.1 Billion people lack access to safe drinking water.As we look to the future the enormous thirst of consumerism that leads us to develop new technology’s such as “biofuels” to find the energy we need is likely to actually be causing more harm than good. With a potential food crisis sending millions more worldwide into starvation and seeing yet more swaths of rainforest and wildlife habitat being cleared at a pace to make way for oil palm plantations, accelerating a policy of deforestation that already see’s 352,000 hectares of forest lost each year.Within these pages, Art becomes a means to communicate awareness and reflection of possible new perspectives of living.

But as long as we have food in our bellies and entertainment to keep us busy, why should we care? Thus, it is the immorality and indifference of our species that will ultimately lead to our own demise?